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JBoss Group Developers Walk Out
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Inquirer, 'seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network.'"
Who are the JBosses now?
6:30 am -- I scrape myself off of Dain's couch and grab the laptop. Dain is perched over a cup of coffee, wearing his "code poet" shirt. My luggage and tripod are by the front door. On our way out to the car I ask myself "are we really going to go through with this?"
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Free your mind.
As of today's date they are still coding on the JBoss porject..
There servered their consulting contracts JBoss group only..
People really should master the skil of reading sometime soon..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
same as the old boss.
In quickly scanning through the scant info they have on the new core developers site, it looks like they have a slightly adapted "internet bubble business plan":
1. Dedicate self to just doing "Open Source" work
2. ???
3. Profit!
Yeah, okay, they are associated with existing projects. But the site makes it sound like they are running a business, but they as yet have no proven business *product* unique to themselves.
Here are the faces behind those names in the article.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
If someone could answer those five basic questions about this story, many of us would appreciate it. Thanks!
Journalism? We don't need no stinkin' journalism!
The middle mind speaks!
So why is it that I only recognize one or two of the names of these "core developers"? And the ones that I do recognize, only barely. They don't seem to be the people that I know are involved with the core development and operations of JBoss and the JBoss Group.
/. to get some publicity. I don't understand why it's not possible for both CDN and JBoss Group to thrive and serve the community. But they seem to think that they can only exist by killing the other "fork", if that's even what it is. Competition is good for the industry, even open source. But CDN looks like they're just trying to cast JBoss Group in a bad light (disparaging their stats).
In fact, it sounds like they're just being antagonistic, and using
Oh, and as I remember it, it wasn't just their call to terminate their contracts with JBoss Group for providing support. JBoss Group was non-renewing the contracts anyways, because they had decided that it was a better idea for them to be the support company themselves. They didn't terminate the contracts immediately when they started their own support offerings, but they did make the decision to not have any new consultants, and to start thinning out the ones they did have.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
This seven person exodus doesn't exactly sound like the most open or fair thing to do to The JBoss Group. But, maybe I'm wrong ...
-- DossyDossy's Blog
Unless of course, you take good care of them and allow each of them to have a little room to grow and a little bit of sun.....
You see, most people would put up with a job that's demanding and requires long hours IF it was rewarding in some way (money helps, but it's not the whole picture)....the sheer venom that I read in that article means they were mad....they wanted to hurt JBoss group as much as they felt they were wronged....
I suspect that the pressure has been building for some time, this isn't just a "..hey, lets form our own business!" daydream.
_looks up from work on tomcat_
_thinks to self: People still care about EJBs? Who knew?_
_goes back to work on tomcat_
(I exaggerate, for comic effect, of course)
Cheers,
prat
As a former enterprise software Sun employee,
I wish the Core guys well. They do good work.
One question though: what about the business?
An lot goes into hiring enterprise consulting,
beyond good coding skills-- think of accounting,
insurance, scheduling, dedicated team reps, etc.
More importantly, my number one consideration
was trustworthiness-- including dependability--
so a mass walkout seems like a difficult launch.
Cheers, Joel
The article was big on dramatic narration at the expense of explaining what's really going on...
Why did these guys do it? Did they decide they'd have more fun at their own company? You'd think, with a move like this, they'd have serious grievences with JBoss Group. Either that or they're being backstabing bastards. I'll assume the first...
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Those who use Java for anything that requires an app server realize this is a signicant post. JBoss is one of the best open source app servers available. Basically, if you use Java, you understand the point. This isn't to say that Java is the best, or that everything else sux, but if you are interested in programming, Java should be on your radar - last I checked, programming and programming languages are a relevant "nerd" topic. If a significant Perl/C tool was affected this way, I doubt there would be any questions as to the validity or significance of this story.
ymmv
We are moving our focus from Java to PHP, and whill henceforth be known as PHBoss.
The real question is what the tripod was for? And did it have anything to do with him on the couch
;-)
I think the real question is: Is Dain's last name "Bramage"?
Inquisitive minds just gotta ask....
Sorry I couldn't resist.
All they are doing is starting their own company in order to make money supporting JBoss and a few other techs. Just like anyone else could. The only difference is that these guys actually have a lot of credibility around jboss, and hence someone might actually hire them.
No real drama here.
There's more name dropping in that timeline article than I've ever read in my life... Winamp, Code Poet t-shirt, Nirvana, Nintendo Advance etc... what are they trying to say? That they're cool? Are these brand names supposed to make me associate them with somebody special? Are they Java-coding rebels?
Ok, I'm half kidding, but the article is hardly newsworthy or even understandable to me.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
JBoss is an open sourced Enterprise Java Server, simialar to BEA Weblogic or IBM's WebSphere. JBoss isn't truly certified as J2EE compliant yet because as a free software package they're not forking over the dough to Sun for the compliance testing.
SWEET! The D&D Player's Handbook is going to be available in Java?! I'm so excited, I don't even know what that means? Hopefully, they'll port it to XML and other buzz-worthy technologies soon. Haha, stick it to WotC
God, I'm a dork. I (futily) hope someone else finds this amusing.
--I hate big sigs.
Not only because they have a pretty website but also because of this:
Please look for us at JavaOneâ booth 1705!
You don't just whip up a booth & promo material in a weekend (as someone who has worked booths I know it's a royal pain). This year I'm attending JavaOne as a developer...I'll definitely be stopping by to see what they've got. No good swag I'm sure...they're probably too poor yet...
That journal did not say anything about their reason for leaving but you are definitely right on the point about their audacity to list "openness" on their site after what they did no matter what the cause.
This is like saying, oh, some Apple developers left to start BeOS. Hopefully with better results. Is that news? (Now, I know the folks say that they plan to continue work on JBoss, but we'll see how long that lasts, or if the end up forking JBoss too.)
Its kinda like XFree86 being forked... only different.
Virtually, Edward Wolpert
JBoss has been garnering a lot of publicity lately, at least in Java circles. It has been quite the center of controvesy, in an otherwise boring world.
First there is the bust up with Sun. JBoss wanting J2EE certification and Sun be a bit difficult (basically saying they wouldn't pass).
Then there was the 'best application server' http://www.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2003/vote .cfm 'vote rigging' issue. One year accussing Oracle of cheaping because they asked their employees to vote, and the next year JBoss does the same (asked its mailing list members to vote for JBoss).
Now of course there is this new company split off from JBoss LLC.
Still to come: will JBoss LLC removing CVS commit rights from the coredevelopers group? Will JBoss LLC go out of business?
We'll see..
In the mean time: at least people are hearing about this great product (developer tiffs aside). No such thing as bad publicity, right? Hopefully, too many people won't be scared off. Then where would all my new customers come from?
- Peter.
RimuHosting - JBoss Hosting on Linux VPS
An application server is a set of tools that do a lot of the scalability work for you. For example, let's say you have a database that 100G big. You have classes/objects that map to all of this data, each referencing each other. Now to instantiate an object, it will require data from the database. It also likely has a pointer to another object which is tied to the database. So, you have three choices:
* Have instantiation of one object bring half the database into memory
* Write code that intelligently loads and unloads references seamlessly from the database on demand (_lots_ of work)
* Get someone else's code to do it for you
Option 3 is the application server. Remember also that if you have your application spread across 13 servers, and all of them need access to the same object, where is the object going to live? If you have 13 copies of it, what happens if an instance gets modified - how do the other 12 instances know to reload their data? If you keep it on one server, how are you going to handle load balancing intelligently?
The purpose of application servers is to have a canned infrastructure capable of handling these problems well. There are many other plumbing considerations that application servers keep track of, such as nested transactions, being able to remap data items onto different tables/attributes, being able to set the environment of an application through a simple text-based descriptor, etc.
Usually I've found that for smaller-scale projects, application servers are overkill. However, for large-scale projects, they keep your project from becoming the ultimate hack-job. The trade-off probably hits when you have about 3 front-end webservers. For some items it hits as soon as you need 2 servers, for the load-balancing/synchronization problems.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Just last night I installed JBoss/Tomcat to kick it around and consider it for our possible future business.
I keep going back and forth about commercial suppport. I keep thinking "gee, in a business where business revenue relies on the server software perhaps we should go ahead and pay the big bucks for a commercial product with support." Then I realize I currently work in a large company that pays for commerical products and the vendor support reps are clueless and we have to eventually figure out the problems and fix them ourselves anyway. (Disclaimer: I'm a network admin, not a developer, so my vendor experiences are with implementation and operational issues.)
Okay, what about liability then? I've heard before that you want to feel there's someone to sue if something goes wrong. But who's ever sued Microsoft (or IBM, Sun, HP, BEA, Oracle) because of lost business revenue due to their products?
What do you really get from paying the big boys big money?
I have a sneaking suspicion I'd come out way ahead financially and operationally if I take the money I save on huge up-front licensing and ongoing per-seat licensing and split it between the business and a support fund, and if we run into a problem we can't handle it's time to hire one of the developers of the software to fix it for us, or in the case of JBoss use the Core Developer's consulting service.
The purpose of application servers is to have a canned infrastructure capable of handling these problems well. There are many other plumbing considerations that application servers keep track of...
you missed the point by a mile, the main purpose of the application server is to hold your business logic tier in a multi tier application, so you have a database-vendor neutral application, and the option to use multiple clients like web, standalone desktop applictions, mobile devices etc..etc.., scalability and mangeability are just bonuses...
My girlfriend used to do web site updates for the Jboss group (actually, she worked for Marc Fleury and his wife, listed as Nathalie Mason-Fleury on the website, director of marketing). She was responsible for most of the bio information going up on the site, as well as doing updates to same, updates for whatever conventions they were hosting/doing, etc. She was fresh out of a 4 year CS degree and needed a job and in this market, she took this web jockey gig.
The Jboss crew uses a CVS repository to manage their web site. It sounded fairly dumb to me when I heard it, but I suppose they feel the need for control and verification of who is making what change to the site. Now, she had never done any work with CVS before - she codes a bit in real languages but hasn't worked on any large projects. So she had to ask some help from the Jboss people on how to use CVS.
The developers, Dain for instance, were incredibly helpful. She was able to snag them on AIM at just about any hour of the day or night for whatever little questions she had about their (often malfunctioning) repository. Marc Fleury and his wife, on the other hand, were not. They were demanding, placing calls in the wee hours for changes, and expecting 1-2 hour turnaround whenever they called. When asked questions, more often than not, Mr. Fleury would take a fit on her. She asked the developers about this and one in particular volunteered that "He's an asshole to everyone, not just you".
Eventually she stopped dealing with them because they just sucked too badly to work for. Low pay, rude behavior and weird hours make for a bad mix. I'm sure they hired someone else who was more masochistic perhaps.
A close friend of the Fleurys (she knows them socially in Atlanta) made the comment recently that Marc owns his own company because he would find it impossible to work _for_ anyone else due to his attitude. I suggest that the recent defections might have something to do with the aforementioned.
On a positive note, Mr. Fleury has found a way to make money off of an open source project. I suppose that deserves kudos. I've known a few businessmen who, while they knew how to make money, were unable to keep the business operating long term because they made strategic errors or alienated people. I suspect Mr. Fleury is going to fall into that category. Maybe he'll learn some lessons for his next business (he's the kind of guy who will assuredly hit the ground running no matter what happens)...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It sounds more like they've been knifed.
Maybe they'll get lucky and get spooned too.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.